OPINION: 5 Biggest Healthcare Lies Told By The GOP

Newsweek brings you the five biggest lies of the health care debate. These are whoppers so big that anyone should be embarrassed to be associated with them. But these lies didn’t originate from some obscure quarter, and they’re not being spread over the backyard fence. Here’s a quick look at the Big Lies, and just a few examples of how the top names on the right are willing to bathe in BS if it helps their funders in the insurance industry.

1. You’ll have no choice in what health benefits you receive.

If you read the bill – Title I, Subtitle E, Sections 141-143, on pages 41-48 – it turns out that the Health Choices Commissioner’s job is, essentially, to make your health choices for you. … The so-called “Health Choices Commissioner” will be the closest the United States has come to having an absolute ruler since King George III.– Heritage Foundation

2. No chemo for older medicare patients.

After he was diagnosed with brain cancer more than a year ago, Sen. Kennedy had excellent care, including surgery and chemotherapy, before he died last week. … In the future, will a man of Kennedy’s age, with brain cancer but without the means of offsetting his own healthcare costs, be kept alive, operated on, given chemotherapy — by a government obsessed with cutting healthcare costs? Rationed care is coming, and the death panels will not be far behind.– Pat Buchanan

3. Illegal immigrants will get free health insurance.

The National Council of La Raza and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus pushed to include illegal immigrants in the president’s healthcare effort. Despite statements to the contrary, the Obama administration could force the American people to pay for the healthcare of millions of illegal immigrants in the U.S.– Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas)

4. Death panels will decide who lives.

The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.— Sarah Palin
In Oregon, the law permits doctors to assist in the suicide of terminal patients who wish to end their lives. Let us assume numerous patients have Alzheimer’s and, so, cannot be part of the decision to end their lives. Who then makes the decision to continue or end life? Would it be unfair to call the decision-makers in those cases a death panel?– Pat Buchanan
“I think that’s a legitimate point. You don’t have to call it death panels if you don’t want to. You can call it a panel. I call it rationing.”– Michael Steele